


A Shift in Climate

by ghost_suit



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Psychological Trauma, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_suit/pseuds/ghost_suit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>**The Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Abuse and Psychological Trauma tags are for mentions of Fenris's history, not for anything actually enacted in the story.</p><p>The weather turns in his first Kirkwall winter; Fenris is uncaring and unsuited for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shift in Climate

Kirkwall was cold. Which, he already knew beforehand yet had made no preparations for. The water off the harbour bore a chill reminder even in the summer. He was going to do what he always did when faced with the elements; ignore it. But when Isabela conceded to finding a pair of leather slacks and Varric did up every button on his shirt, it was undeniable that winter had set its sights upon the city. Hawke gave Merrill a fur-lined hat that made her look especially feline. Hawke himself didn’t seem bothered by the cold. He ran hot, he insisted. Though, he was always eager to draw near the generous hearth of the Hanged Man the moment he arrived.

Being a coastal city, it didn’t exactly snow at first but there was a cold that was damp and heavy that sunk through the skin down into the bone. It left his feet feeling numb and then painfully pricked by needles and the tips of his ears stinging. The wind was perhaps the most bracing, cutting across the skin of his face as he walked, cross-armed and hunched forward against it. Invariably he always found himself walking against the wind. During the day, it assailed his exposed skin and then shortly after midnight the entire direction changed and he found himself facing the same element under moonlight. At least the cold helped with the smell of piss, fish and vomit.

The early winter of Kirkwall quickly made the roads a briny soup. It left his feet cracked and bleeding. It’s fine. Except, until it isn’t. And then he doesn’t leave the mansion.

For days.

It would have been a simple thing to prepare himself for the winter. He wasn’t wanting for coin or above theft. But he never made time for it. In this predicament now, he felt foolish yet still oddly...stubborn. He’d chosen this, for whatever reason. Or neglected it without good reason. Now, faced with it directly it was easier to simply accept it rather than bemoan the avoidable situation. It hurt but not anything he hadn’t felt before and physical pain was simply...a task to tend to.

What he’s hated more than any pain is the cold. He won’t ever complain of it because it is such a minor thing in all that he’s faced but it _irks_ him. The way someone doesn’t like a flavour or doesn’t like a colour he hates the Maker-forsaken cold. _Vashedan._ He runs through all the curses he knows in every language he’s learned.

He keeps himself warm by the hearth. It hurts the split skin on his feet to bathe, so he carefully washes himself with a bucket of boiled water instead. He makes a simple salve to help seal the wounds and prevent infection.

He keeps himself warm with the bottles of wine accumulated in the cellar. It would take him a whole winter, maybe longer, of truly dedicated drinking to go through it all. He watches from the window as carts and people work their way through the miserable conditions. One night, a storm blows in and the entire town is blanketed in something more substantial than the sopping mess they’d seen until then. He woke briefly in the night to the chill, and the strange light that came with snow, but sighed and went back to sleep.

He keeps himself warm under a thick fur and woven blanket and that’s where Aveline finds him the morning after the storm. The sun is suddenly slicing through the room and she’s looking down at him with a frown. He squints up at her for a moment but then frowns too and closes his eyes.

“What?” he asks callously.

_“Good morning,_ Fenris,” she says unkindly. “Is this where you’ve been?”

Fenris grunted.

She crouches down beside him, watching intently.

“Fenris,” she repeats. He opens his eyes and glares up at her and is about to tell her to leave. Instead, he sees concern softening the hard lines of her expression. Her eyes are a steady concise kind of green that makes the green of his eyes seem as dull and muddy as the streets of this city by comparison. The heavy peppering of freckles across her face sends her skin into a healthy blaze. Aveline is beautiful; a handsome woman who looked at the future with the confidence that she will carry herself through it regardless of what it brought or took. Hawke told him that she’d killed her husband to spare him from a slow, blighted death as they fled Lothering. It was something he could hardly imagine, knowing her even as little as he did. He always wanted to ask her how she bore that so that he might learn the same. But, he sensed it was not a thing that could be taught. So he remained silent, envied her steadiness at arm’s length.

“Hawke’s back,” she told him. “He’s been asking after you.”

He frowns again and wants to demand why it should matter. However, she wouldn’t have the patience for feigned ignorance. Hawke made no attempts in masking his affection towards him. Fenris made little attempt to resist it. But that didn’t mean he knew exactly what to do with it. Reciprocation was one of so many things he felt unschooled in. Until he’d fled Danarius, there’d been no need to think of what he _should_ do, only a need to follow what he was _told_ to do.

“I see,” he replied flatly, looking down at his hand bunched around the woven blanket. He sighs and starts to draw himself up, slinging his arms over his knees. When she looks at the tattoos he feels suddenly bare in a way beyond his skin but she makes no comment. She’s tactful in a way that most aren’t and he likes that about her. He rolls his head back, trying to work out the knot at the top of his spine. “He could come himself.”

Aveline scoffed and stood, moving towards a chair and taking a seat.

“He’s afraid to. He worries that you don’t think well of him.”

“There…is no reason for him to be afraid,” Fenris countered, though weakly. Where it came to mages, he could see Hawke’s apprehension. Even outside of that topic however, Fenris was well aware that his words, even when softened by drink came out bluntly without regard for repercussion. That there was something wrong with his humour, that he could make horrifying mentions seemingly without thought that killed conversations and made everyone uncomfortable. Then there were the things he said simply because he was impatient or couldn’t let anyone think that his silence was permission. Atop it all, even if pressed he likely would not be able to recall the last time he’d made amends for something he’d said. Before it hadn’t mattered; he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough for it to matter. But now, on occasion, he saw the hurt flash on the familiar faces of people…whom Hawke did not want hurt. So he tried to taper his words more. Sometimes he succeeded.

He’d made Anders laugh in earnest once or twice, of all people. That was horrifying. Though he found it easier to tolerate the mage provided that Varric was there, it hadn’t made him any less distrustful. That being said even he could see that it was better if things could go more smoothly for the sake of their loose but increasingly merry band. There was work to be done that kept them fed and watered. Occasionally, even work done to feel some sense of a good morality about. Work that made him wonder if there might be some way he can redeem at least some part of himself for the wickedness he’d done in his frantic flight for freedom.

Even if while they do some good, Hawke keeps him from anything involving mages, even if Hawke won’t bring it up, but won’t deny it if asked; even if Hawke hides an apostate sister, a blood mage and a possessed healer with a distressing interest in Tevinter texts. Even if, even so, in spite of disapproving, disagreeing and arguing he _sometimes_ thinks he might be close to something...happy. As dangerous a thought that is. With Hawke, there’s a heat that pools at the bottom of his stomach and it’s sickly sweet and urges the blood in his veins to run hot and fast. He’s not fool enough to deny what it is. There’s an airiness that fills the cavity of his chest and quickens his heart when there is no reason for it to quicken. His limbs seem to flounder and his nervousness betrays him; how should he feel to be looked at with this increasingly adoring value? He thought he’d known. And though when Hawke looks to him there’s some part of it that still makes him feel dirty and in fact very much without value, he thinks, with some hope, that the learned repulsion will pass. At least now he knows enough to know that it’s learned. He thinks that there might be a day where he doesn’t retreat from his touch. Hawke works harder than anyone he’s ever known to be a good man and he so desperately wants to trust him. For now, it takes everything to keep that veneer of calm that came so easily when there was a blade in his hand until he can figure out if Hawke is indeed a man worthy of his trust.

How one man could bring him too such a precarious position unnerved him. He knew better and yet when it came to following Hawke he did so almost carelessly, like someone who had not blindly followed before. It wasn’t only the promise of fulfilling a debt that he found excuses to be at Hawke’s side. He bent down, pushing his hair out of his face, his fingers drawing to the knot still stubbornly tied at the base of his neck.

_Let him be one I can trust,_ he pleaded in silence.

“So, what have you been doing holed up in here?” Aveline asked, breaking his thoughts. Her voice was as clear as the sun that shone through the window. _The morning after the storm._

“Nothing. It’s…been cold,” he says flatly. Hearing it aloud it sounds feeble. He sighed in frustration and threw the blanket off his feet, revealing the tender looking flesh he’d done his best to tend to.

“Oh, Fenris,” Aveline says in surprise, drawing forwards a fraction at the sight. She doesn’t chide him for not having boots. “Won’t you go to Anders?”

Fenris barred his teeth at the sound of the mage’s name as though it polluted the very air around them. The thought of being touched by that man any more than necessary filled him with such potent disgust that his thoughts went white in a flash of anger.

_“No.”_

Aveline sighed and shifted her gaze off to one side, frustrated with him. When she looked back at him it was with the sternness she was already well-known for among the guard.

“Fine. Then see another healer. There’s no reason for that mess to be drawn out any longer than necessary.”

She stood, moving towards a satchel he hadn’t noticed by the door.

“Anyways, I thought that the change of weather might have had something to do with your absence so I brought you these,” she said, drawing out a jacket and boots from the canvas satchel. “The guard has commissioned to replace some of the guardsman's gear so I went through the old pieces and pulled a few that should be your size. They’re in good shape. Try them on now if you can and if they don’t fit, I’ll go have another look.”

She tossed him a pair of woolen socks. He caught it in a daze, stunned by her efforts.

“You didn’t need to do this, Aveline,” Fenris said, the words feeling thick and slow from his lips.

“Try them on,” she urged. There was a small quirk at the corner of her lips and a flash of large, pearly teeth. So, though he had to do so tenderly, he kicked back the blanket and caught the boots as she tossed them to him and proceeded to try them on. The last time he’d worn any footwear had perhaps been when he was still in Minathros, unwillingly dressed for a party. He’d been a favourite and was in fact not unused to “gifts”. But this…like with Hawke, felt different. This was genuine concern, not the obligated upkeep of an _investment,_ or a prized _pet._ He knew what it felt like to be fussed over through every detail, to have his hair carefully clipped, and to be painted. He knew what it was to be dressed in the finest clothes only to be stripped of them for the pleasure of others.

He stood and took a breath, clearing his thoughts. This is not what that was. He took several testing steps before striding through the room in earnest. Out of the cocoon of his bed, it was cold in the room, the fire having died through the night and Aveline tosses the jacket to him. It’s a simple thing in a drab grey, but quilted on the front with a generous and soft lining on the inside. It’d been patched in several spots, but done with care. He pulls it on and it’s wide at the shoulder but for something not made for him, an adequate fit. Aveline has a good eye.

“I couldn’t find anything with a hood,” Aveline says apologetically, watching him do up the ties on the inside then laying the front flat to do the wooden togs on the opposite side on the outer layer.

He shook his head.

“I didn’t ask for anything,” he said plainly then cringed inwardly. His head flicks upwards to the ceiling, looking desperately for a point that isn’t her face. “I mean…this is more than…thank-you, Aveline.”

“You’re welcome, Fenris. How are the boots?”

“They fit.”

“Good.”

She leaves, citing her patrol duties and leaves him in the room with the modest gifts and his conflicting feelings of how to respond to being cared for. He’s pleasantly surprised to find that he’s genuinely, simply, _very pleased_ that she’d gone out of the way. Perhaps because there was nothing so extravagant to merely be the product of artifice. These were the simple boots and jacket of a guardsman, well-worn and well-cared for.

That night he goes to the Hanged Man to find where Hawke had been.

“You look…that’s…a handsome jacket,” Hawke fumbles. Fenris tries to duck his head to hide his smile. There wasn’t anything handsome about the jacket or the boots. They were entirely practical, standard issue and only decommissioned because they’d begun to show enough wear to fall outside of the acceptable standard. But, he likes that Hawke outwardly gets as flustered and blatantly awkward as he feels.

Isabela catches his eye and smirks and he feels the blood rush to his cheeks while doing his utmost to glare at her for intruding on the moment. She laughs and turns back to her drink. He starts to take it off, and as he starts pulling his arms out of it, Hawke steps behind him.

“Let me,” he said.

Fenris lets him. It’s a small, gentle and entirely unnecessary gesture. Hawke doesn’t try to touch anywhere extra, focused entirely on carefully extracting him from the safety of the new vestments. A _gentleman,_ Fenris thinks wryly. The warm, _bubbling_ feeling jumped around from his chest into his stomach, uncomfortable but not unwelcome. Free of the jacket, Fenris turns to face Hawke, who’s holding the garment between them and glances off to the wall as he raises a tentative hand.

“Thank-you,” he mutters and places his hand on Hawke’s wide shoulder for only a fraction of a moment before quickly turning to go join Varric and Merrill at a table with what looks like a game of Wicked Grace.

He resists thumping at his chest with a closed fist and settles in beside the dwarf, ignoring the burning feeling of Isabela’s gaze on him. Despite all this clustering of emotion, he’s thanking Aveline silently for the gifts and feels that increasing sense of satisfaction that comes with being with these people, in this place, staying and at the very least considering that perhaps a future here would not be such a poor thing to consider.


End file.
